I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

The whole history of mankind shows when Religion and State were
united, the world saw only political and social oppression, injustice
and disasters. The same thing is happening in many countries now where
some people are killing others in the name of their religion and for
imposing their brand of religion on others by terror and coercion to
take political power. But they reject the other course, a humane and
sensible course, which allows a peaceful existence of all people in a
democratic way, which leads to the well-being of all, respect for all
religions and their followers, such as, Muslims, Christians, Jews,
Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, Buddhists, animists, all sorts of believers or
non-religious people.

Under such a democratic and humane system all people have equal
social and political rights. There is no discrimination against anyone
because of their religion or oppression of any religion under any
pretext. All people have freedom to follow their religions according to
their customs and traditions freely. Religion becomes a matter of
personal choice over which no other authority, social or political, can
intervene.

The question before all of us is: which is the better way? I think
the people who have not been fully brainwashed and indoctrinated will
accept the democratic path. But those who want to kill and terrorise to
impose their only misguided convictions and dogmas will continue to kill
and terrorise. If they gain power, they will impose their unjust laws,
discriminate against other faiths and sects and make the life of
minorities intolerable and brutish.

NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg absurdly calls Afghanistan an Alliance success story. As
ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) “completes” its “mission
at the end of this year.”

“This unprecedented international effort has contributed to a
better future for Afghan men, women and children,” Stoltenberg claims.
“And it has enhanced global security.”

Disaster more accurately describes things. Conditions are horrific.
Perhaps worse than ever. A testimony to US-led NATO high crimes against
peace.

Afghanistan’s new puppet government agreed to let around 10,000 US
troops remain indefinitely. Immune from Afghan laws. Free to rampage
with impunity. On the pretext of serving in an advisory capacity.

Afghanistan today reflects “the grand illusion of the American
cause.” What CIA officials called Vietnam decades earlier. After over 13
years of neo-colonial war, Washington won’t cut its losses and leave.
For good reason.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The Zionists have cultivated anti-Semitism by their anti-human
hasbara, their ethnic cleansing of Palestine and their brutal genocidal
wars against the captive Palestinians of the Occupied Palestine. The
world sees now what they do and what they have done before. As a result
many ordinary people have nothing but revulsion and disgust against what
the Zionists stand for and the horrible war crimes they have committed.
The last major crimes they committed were in Gaza in July-August in 2014
which we all witnessed on our telescreens. Unluckily many Jews have
fallen in the trap of the Zionist deception. That has been a deeply
tragic thing for the Jews, Palestinians and many other people around the
world. The shameful ‘victories’ of the Zonists are losses for humanity.

——————————British Jewish actress Miriam Margolyes says anti-Semitism is horrible but Israel is ‘stupid for allowing people to vent it.’

The British Jewish actress who played Professor Sprout in the Harry
Potter films has called Israel “stupid” for allowing people to “vent”
anti-Semitism.

Miriam Margolyes told Radio Times, a British television and radio
magazine, that there has been a “troubling backlash” against Jews in the
wake of the summer’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, British media
reported.

“I loathe Hamas, but they were democratically elected and Israel’s
behaviour is not acceptable,” she said. “There’s been a troubling
backlash.”

Margolyes grew up in a Jewish household in Britain, according to Sky
News. Her parents are descendants of immigrants from Belarus.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Islam is a religion, a great religion, but it is not a political
ideology for multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies
of the present times. It contains some golden principles such as
equality, fairness and justice that are applicable in politics because
such universal principles are recognised as the pillars of democracy and
open society. But that does not mean religion,
any religion for that matter, can be an alternative to democratic form
of government because this inevitably leads to the concentration of
power and influence in the hands of some potentates and despots. This
has been the case in the the Middle Ages where the Church dominated
states and it became a symbol of tyrannical rule and oppressive
practices. It is quite so in some Islamic countries where dynastic
despots and oligarchs rule by using Islam for their own ends and state
oppression.

It’s not difficult to see that different people have different
interpretations of Islam. Historically, there has never been any
unanimity of views in Islam on a range of issues. During the formative
period of the Islamic Caliphate after 632 C.E. differing and mutually
exclusive interpretation of Islamic state and Islamic rule had soon
started to take shape when the community split along the Sunni-Shia
lines. Such differences have multiplied over the course of fourteen
centuries. Even within the Sunnis different schools of thought emerged
and there is no way they can ever be reconciled. Nor, can the Sunni and
Shia concepts of what constitutes Islamic ruler be reconciled because of
the differing concepts that underlie Caliphate (Sunni) and Imamate
(Shia).

When some people dare to give their opinions, which do not repeat the
centuries-old stereotypes they are attacked for their heretical views
by the orthodox and rigid literalists of traditions. They assume only
they have the ‘true’ version of Islam; therefore, only they are the ones
who can rightfully speak on behalf of God and Islam while all the
others are groping in the darkness of ignorance and suffering from the
malaise of modern Western ideas of democracy and human rights. However,
it is essential to explain that democracy is a form of government in
which the will of the population of a country is decisive in forming
policies that advance the cause of the citizens in social, religious,
economic and political matters. In a genuine democracy this will
reflects the actual needs of the people but in a bogus democracy the
form of democracy is used to further individual or particular interests
while paying lip-service to the values of democracy.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

First of all, as a Humanist I fully acknowledge the positive aspects
of all major religions including Islam. But what ignorant people do in
the name of a religion is a different thing; they negate or pervert the
positive sides of religions. Unfortunately the case of many indoctrinated
and misled Pakistani people and their support for the blasphemy laws
shows the degree of ignorance that prevails in that country. The misuse
of the religion of the majority by the lawmakers
shows how they enacted such laws in violation of basic human rights
including the freedom of speech. No surprise if the judiciary upholds
these laws and proves pivotal in perpetuating gross injustice and denial
of justice on flimsy grounds. Thus Pakistani religious minorities
suffer; they are victimised in the name of ‘safeguarding Islam’ as we
can see in the case of Asia Bibi.

————————————

By Adeel Raja and Susannah Cullinane, CNN

October 20, 2014

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) — A Christian woman
sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan plans to take her case to
the country’s highest court after a high court last week rejected her
appeal, her attorney says.

Asia Bibi, a mother of
five from Punjab province, was accused of defiling the name of the
Prophet Mohammed during a 2009 argument with Muslim fellow field
workers.

The workers had refused to drink from a bucket of water she had touched because she was not Muslim.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Leon Trotsky has either been demonised or idealised within the
socialist movement for various reasons. Those who have demonised him saw
only a personification of counter-revolutionary in him. But those who
idealised him see in him the only great revolutionary in the twentieth
century. Thus unluckily the evaluation of Trotsky has become a question
of putting him in one category or the other, nothing in between in these
two extremes. Such modes of thinking are still common among his
supporters or detractors. But this is not the way the historic role of
an eminent Marxist leader and revolutionary should be judged and
described. Neither hagiography nor calumnies do justice to a great
revolutionary who despite his differences with the Bolsheviks came to
the side of Vladimir Lenin and became a dynamic voice defending and
serving the October Revolution. But he was not the man who could have
survived the tumultuous times once Lenin was no more. What happened to
him after the death of Lenin in 1924 is well-known to all.

Friday, October 17, 2014

For many years after the Vietnam War, we enjoyed the “Vietnam
syndrome,” in which US presidents hesitated to launch substantial
military attacks on other countries. They feared intense opposition akin
to the powerful movement that helped bring an end to the war in
Vietnam. But in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush
declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”With George W. Bush’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack
Obama’s drone wars in seven Muslim-majority countries and his escalating
wars in Iraq and Syria, we have apparently moved beyond the Vietnam
syndrome. By planting disinformation in the public realm, the government
has built support for its recent wars, as it did with Vietnam.Now the Pentagon is planning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
the Vietnam War by launching a $30 million program to rewrite and
sanitize its history. Replete with a fancy interactive website,
the effort is aimed at teaching schoolchildren a revisionist history of
the war. The program is focused on honoring our service members who
fought in Vietnam. But conspicuously absent from the website is a
description of the antiwar movement, at the heart of which was the GI
movement.Continues >>

Editor’s remarks:
Netanyahu is saying what is obviously Israeli position despite the
charade of ‘peace negotiations’ and the mouldy mantra of the ‘two-state’
solution that has been the stock-in-trade of the Israeli deception and
thereby misleading the Palestinians and the world public opinion. Most
of the Arab states and their servile rulers are dependent upon US
imperialism for their survival. Except for an occasional pronouncenment
of solidarity with the people of Palestine, mostly for domestic
consumption and to please the Arab masses, the countries like Egypt and
Saudi Arabia are furthering the Israeli designs. What makes these
countries partners of Israel and for which objectives is not always
divulged openly.

Nasir Khan, Editor

———————

Netanyahu says there will never be a real Palestinian state

Lots of folks are talking about this. Last Friday, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a press conference in Hebrew in which
he stated that he would never accept Palestinian sovereignty in the West
Bank because Israel’s security needs are too great in an era of Islamic
radicalism. His remarks have been summarized by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel, with limited quotations.

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: There
cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish
security control of the territory west of the River Jordan,” Netanyahu
said, leading Horovitz to say: “That sentence, quite simply, spells the
end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a
Palestinian state.” Just Bantustans, what we’ve observed again and again
in recent years.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

What is the health of the American empire? How does the American
empire differ from all other empires in history? What factor will
inevitably be the collapse of the American empire? Is it supporting
policies that actually play against US interests?